It’s All In the Names

At the height of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler’s reign during World War II, the party began changing and influencing daily life in Germany. Their tactics of propagating, not only the Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler, but also his message, and the party’s beliefs. This included everything from conventional propaganda methods of the time, to giving cities official titles and changing the names of streets. I am looking specifically at roads in, and out of the city of Munich that had their names changed. The map is one of Munich from 1938 (Zentralverlag).

There were two reasons the Nazi Party changed street names. The first was naming the streets after Adolf Hitler himself. In Munich alone there were seven different streets named after Adolf Hitler in different variations. These variations included differences between “Adolf-Hitler-Street,” “Place,” “Square,” “Alley,” or “Avenue.” These streets were usually in busy or important areas of the city, or more importantly, the streets were in major, influential German cities like Munich itself (Spotts). Hitler as a public figure was almost deified by the German people who believed in what he would talk about in his famously powerful speeches.

The other reason a street may have been renamed was for other pivotal people or important places to the Nazi Party in General. People with high rank within the Party may have had a German city named after them. The Nazi Party as a whole used Munich as a general propagator for their cause. “Munich,” spelled Munchen in German, translates to “The Movement” referring to the Nazi Party as a whole. This new name for the city made sense because the Nazi Party was founded and headquartered in Munich (Spotts). Even though the city of Munich was the setting for a failed coup by Hitler and the Nazi Party to take power over the city in 1923. Hitler and the Nazi’s were arrested for this act, the Bierhall Putsch, but Hitler wanted people to remember the positive outcomes of his prison time, including writing Mein Kampf.

How did the Nazis pull this off? Because the NSDAP were responsible for publishing the maps and atlases while they were in power and their own publishing press. The renaming of streets is still occurring in Germany and around the world today. However, some historians argue that this changing of street names is a revision of the history told in the street names (Crossland). The street names being named after a figure that was deified at the time, is what is left to be remembered of the regime that was really more of a dictator than a fair ruler of a democracy.